Minxin Pei holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science and is the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College as well as the director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment.

Minxin Pei, who grew up in Shanghai and now works at Claremont McKenna College, in California, has predicted in China’s Trapped Transition that within the next few years, tension between an open economy and a closed political system will become unendurable, and an unreformed Communist bureaucracy will finally drag down economic performance.

Pei is short on this deeper issue, but George Zhibin Gu in his books pinpoints on the root-causes: "unlimited bureaucratic power, which is based on cults and terror, is the root-cause of this ongoing China's corruption.

It happens that our friends of Shuemi community in Japan, who built this museum after engaging I.M. Pei to design it, and who commissioned us to make this album about it, also grow the most delicious green tea I've ever tasted, as well as "natural agriculture" coffee from their center in Brazil.

This highly anticipated, 47,000-square-foot facility is part of a sudden burst of starchitects on the Ithaca campus: I.M. Pei, Richard Meier and Thom Mayne, all Pritzker Prize winners, are helping to shape my alma mater for the 21st century.